Saturday, July 7, 2012

Obama's Not Being Direct With Us When He Says We're Heading In The Right Direction

Bad economic news this week on the jobs front. Only 80,000 jobs added last month. It is estimated that the economy needs 125,000 jobs each month just to keep up with population growth.

As expected, Obama and the White House tries to spin the news favorably -- an economy sucking wind being the biggest threat to his reelection. At the Tatler, Bryan Preston catches some of that spin - the White House saying you shouldn't read too much into a monthly report. What he actually catches is that this is the 30th time they've told us not to read too much into a monthly report.

Pointing to the fact that 80,000 jobs were created, [Obama] declares the news is “a step in the right direction,” but he’s not done yet, much work remains to be done, and so on.

Obama thinks adding fewer jobs in a month than new people come into the workforce is the "right direction"?

Yike.

And that phrase, "right direction", I know that phrase. Here's a post from two years ago in which I noted that no matter the economic news, Obama would declare that we are heading in the "right direction". It included this chart:

I stopped keeping track of his penchant for telling our lying eyes that the economy is heading in the right direction, but let's do some catch up. Searching Google for "right direction" and "remarks by the president" on whitehouse.gov we get this:

That's 137 entries on whitehouse.gov in which Obama has used the phrase "right direction" - and that's after google eliminated entries it deemed as repetitive - it actually returned 308 results in total. Obama uses the phrase in several varieties - for example he used the phrase a number of times in the stumping he did for the 2010 elections in his car in the ditch metaphor.

Obama apparently believes the idea that if you repeat something enough, people might start to believe it. That theory failed pretty spectacularly in the shellacking the Democrats suffered in the 2010 elections, but you'd be silly to think Obama would learn from it. He's lying about the economy heading in the right direction, and let's face it, he's not that smart.